Adidas continues to dominate our weekly Viral Video Chart, which tracks views of campaigns in the week ending each Sunday, as compiled by Visible Measures. The brand's "Take It" goes to the top for the second consecutive week while "There Will Be Haters" hangs in the top 10 even as it recedes to No.6 from No. 2.

Samsung takes over that No. 2 slot with the "Movie Magic" campaign it introduced at the Oscars, which displays the versatility of its mobile devices by touting how they could be used to shoot the next great film.

But for viral persistence, Google's "The Google App" campaign is making an impressive showing, appearing on the chart for the twelfth time since September. (It fell off for a time but is back in action.)

Last year, just 14% of marketers and digital business executives used mobile wallets to engage with their customers. Fast forward to this year, when 27% plan to add mobile wallets to their marketing tool kit. Why the shift? As consumer usage begins to reach critical mass over the next three years, mobile wallets will see an integration of value-added services that push the platform beyond payments. The result will be a new marketing channel.

How will this work? Consumers spend the majority of their time on just a few mobile apps, and increasingly on new audience portals like messaging and social media apps. To reach consumers where they are, brands will be required to "borrow" mobile moments from platforms with huge engagement. Mobile wallets will become one of these platforms, used by 15% to 20% of U.S. smartphone owners by 2018, according to Forrester.

Last week, Gemalto, the world's largest maker of cell phone SIM cards, admitted it was the target of "sophisticated attacks" by American and British spy agencies. This week, the company is asking brands to trust it with mobile payments.

On Tuesday, Gemalto and Tapit, a mobile ad-tech firm, are launching an app that allows consumers to buy a myriad of internet-connected items with one touch from a smartphone. It's feasible thanks to near-field communication (NFC) chips in "tens of thousands of products," said company co-founder Andrew Davis. In the past, the Australian startup has worked mostly with content discovery: shoppers could tap a Samsung tablet with their smartphone, for instance, and be directed to a mobile web site on the product. Mr. Davis said the company works with 60 brands.

Now, it is turning that capability into mobile commerce, allowing customers to charge the purchases through Gemalto's billing services. The offering is starting with small purchases and according to Tapit "the payment is done directly via carrier billing which is completed through the browser."

Mark Zuckerberg's newest endeavor has ruffled feathers in the telecom business. On Monday, he tried to make amends.

During the keynote speech at Mobile World Congress, in Barcelona, the Facebook CEO defended Internet.org, the company's bid to spread web connections worldwide. Critics say the initiative benefits from wireless operators' infrastructure investment. Mr. Zuckerberg began his talk praising the carriers and downplaying Facebook's efforts, including its attempts to deploy satellites and drones for internet connection.

"While it's sexy to talk about satellites, the real work happens here. We're not really the ones leading this," he said. "The real companies that are driving this are the operators."

Google unveiled plans to offer U.S. mobile-phone service and said it will launch solar-powered planes to provide wireless Internet service in the world's unconnected areas in the next few months.

"We're working hard to create a backbone to provide connectivity," Senior VP Sundar Pichai said at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Building on the success of its Android operating system, selling its own wireless service could enable Google to add mobile-device subscribers and make it easier to serve those users ads via smartphones and tablets.

Nick Brien, the advertising executive who formerly led McCann Worldgroup, is joining digital-marketing agency iCrossing as its CEO.

Hearst Corporation, parent company of iCrossing, told staff of Mr. Brien's hiring this morning. His appointment, effective immediately, includes a new role at the parent company: president of Hearst Magazines Marketing Services

Mr. Brien is a seasoned agency executive, with several tours of duty as CEO at Interpublic Group of Companies' largest ad agencies, including Mediabrands and Universal McCann. Prior to IPG, he was an executive at Starcom MediaVest.

HTC Corp. is working with Valve Corp. to challenge Sony Corp. and Facebook Inc.'s Oculus as an early player in the virtual-reality market.

HTC Vive -- a set of VR goggles to pair with a controller and sensor towers -- uses game developer Valve's Steam VR tracking technology to let users walk around and explore simulated environments. Vive will run content from Valve, as well as Google, Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. and Time Warner's HBO and will be available to consumers this year, the Taoyuan, Taiwan-based smartphone maker said.

HTC has in recent months unveiled its periscope-shaped RE action camera and developed a smart wristband with Under Armour as it looks beyond smartphones to reverse three years of annual sales declines. The phone maker is the latest to enter the nascent VR market, after Sony's Project Morpheus headset and Facebook's purchase of Oculus VR last year.

Marketers specializing in mobile no longer have to fight for scraps: mobile has become a part of client budgets. Now, it needs to get much better.

That was the consensus from the opening panel for a day-long industry conference, organized by IAB, Facebook and Nasdaq at the Mobile World Congress. Media executives offered common critiques of mobile ads -- dull banner ads, shoddy creative and inadequate metrics. But they also suggested the format was shifting from interruptive ads to more contextual campaigns, such as those that incorporate data from connected devices -- and that's what they'd like to see more of.

"In our industry, we mistakenly think that every place is a place to put an ad," Mike Parker, global chief digital officer, McCann Worldwide, said on stage. He mentioned messaging apps, which draw increasingly more consumer attention, as an example. "Not every place is a good place to connect. You need to understand the consumer journey."

Staples' newest office space, located in downtown Seattle, is decked out with graffiti-covered walls, large windows overlooking the Puget Sound and a ping-pong table. The spacious loft is fit for a Silicon Valley startup. And for good reason: it is home to Staples e-commerce team and is designed to lure engineers and other in-demand talent to the company.

More and more retailers are in Seattle to access the crop of engineering talent at companies like Amazon and Microsoft. The city's relatively close proximity to Silicon Valley is also a big draw. Alibaba set up shop within poaching distance of Amazon last year, as did Staples. Nordstrom, Costco and Zulily have too staked their claims in the Seattle market, which has become an alternative to the overrun and expensive San Francisco Bay Area.

Now, as more marketers move to the area -- including big tech players like Facebook, Google and Dropbox -- the competition is fierce for top-tier talent. Amazon alone hired 1,700 engineers in Seattle last year, using its team of more than 500 tech recruiters, said Albert Squiers, director of technology recruiting at Fuel Talent, a Seattle-based recruiting firm that has worked with Zulily, Nordstrom and Amazon. Amazon did not reply to a request for comment.

As Samsung strains under pressure from Apple, the Korean tech giant is banking its mobile future on a pair of new devices and a mobile payment system, coming this summer, that could have a broader retail reach than that of its rival.

On Sunday, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Samsung unveiled the Galaxy S6, its latest flagship smartphone, and the Galaxy S6 Edge, a model with a curved edge screen. Both come with installed with Samsung Pay, the company's anticipated entrance into mobile payments. The company said the touchless payment system works with magnetic card reading technology, incorporated from its recent purchase of LoopPay, as well as with near-field communication, the tool used by offerings from Apple and Google.

"It's built right in," JK Shin, Samsung's president and CEO, said on stage about the payment technology. "That's a design with purpose. That's the future."

Another Dove campaign positioning the brand as the friend of female self-esteem is being accused of Doing It Wrong. If you missed the Washington Post's take on Wednesday, which called the new effort an "egregious overstep," here's one key bit:

The only purpose of this cooing, of course, is to lull consumers into a sense of intimacy so human, so convincing, that you forget that Dove is actually trying to sell you something; that in fact, Dove only exists on this planet to sell you things, and that Dove's pursuit of sales occasionally involves behavior you may find offensive and/or unsavory.

Last year Dove took a hit over a campaign that apparently tricked women into believing they were trying medical patches that would make them prettier (all the better to reveal that all they needed was self-esteem). This time the criticism is over Dove tweets sidling up to women who sound down about their bodies to reassure them that they are beautiful.

It doesn't matter whether you think the dress is blue and black, or white and gold, because the BuzzFeed post that launched thousands of arguments -- it's white and gold, by the way (editor's note: No, it's black and blue) -- really serves as a viral promotion for the strength of BuzzFeed's native-advertising department.

The post, which you've most certainly seen by now, is not a native ad. It repurposes a Tumblr asking readers the color of a dress. And thanks to a trick of the eye, some people see blue and black; others see white and gold.

By midnight on Thursday, more than 10 million people had looked at it, according to a BuzzFeed spokeswoman. The post is now closing in on 26 million. At one point, the spokeswoman said, there were more than 670,000 readers on BuzzFeed at the same time -- 500,000 of them coming from mobile devices. Half of these visitors were reading the dress post. It became the top trending topic on Twitter in the U.S. and on Friday the morning TV shows wouldn't let it go.

It never ceases to amaze me when companies at the top of their industries actively fail to innovate. This is especially troublesome because, as leaders, it is not that they lack the means to innovate. Rather, they usually have the means, and unequalled resources, but make active decisions to block innovation.

Whether it was General Motors in the 1970s deciding that there was not enough profit in small cars (enter the Japanese car companies), or Kodak deciding not to leverage its vast research into digital imaging technology and mountains of digital patents (enter digital companies right and left), or Sports Illustrated deciding that its once-a-year swimsuit issue extravaganza was the future of sports multimedia (enter ESPN) -- the road is littered with leaders whose hubris led to downfall.

Perhaps the most shocking example of a leader that fails to innovate is the television industry.

A few months ago, Shaun McBride, a prolific and popular Snapchat user, went to Bangkok courtesy of Marriott. He let his fans dictate his agenda, sending collages of visual messages, or snaps, at each tourist stop. "At the end of the day," he said, "I'd give a shout-out to Marriott for hooking me up with the hotels."

That kind of brand marketing thrives on the platform, explained the 27-year old, who was commissioned for similar work by Disney and has worked for AT&T and Samsung. To demonstrate what he won't do on Snapchat, he adopts a salesman patois: "Ten dollars off at your next stay!"

Brands must be hands-off, giving social-media savants like him one brief: "be true to yourself."

Netflix doesn't feature ads on its streaming video service. It likely never will. But product placement is a different matter.

What has been suspected has been confirmed: Brands can arrange to have their products appear in Netflix's original series.

Anheuser-Busch InBev has signed a deal to be the exclusive beer marketer featured in the new season of Netflix's original series "House of Cards," which premieres on February 27. The company's Stella Artois, Budweiser and Shock Top brands will appear in the third season's episodes, building on a partnership that dates back to the first season of "House of Cards." The company is not paying for the placement and is instead providing stock for props.

The new ad sales chief at Will Ferrell's Funny or Die comes with a BuzzFeed pedigree.

Andy Wiedlin, BuzzFeed's former chief revenue officer, will serve as interim head of sales at the humor site, which is ending its three-year-old ad-sales agreement with Turner Broadcasting.

"We are proud of the branded content we created together for our advertisers," Funny or Die and Turner said in a joint statement issued Thursday. "Our companies will continue to explore opportunities to collaborate on original content."

The Federal Communications Commission today adopted "net-neutrality" rules that would prohibit companies such as Verizon and Comcast from blocking or slowing online traffic and from offering faster service in return for payment.

Not surprisingly, Verizon wasn't pleased. Sort of surprisingly, the company went full smart-ass in its response.

The company issued a press release dated 1934 and partially headlined "'Throwback Thursday' Move Imposes 1930s Rules on the Internet."

U.S. regulators invoked broad powers to ensure that Web traffic for all users is treated equally, adopting net-neutrality rules that supporters say will preserve a wide-open Internet and that opponents vow to fight in court.

The measure approved Thursday by the Federal Communications Commission prohibits companies such as AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp. from blocking or slowing online traffic and from offering faster service in return for payment. It also brings wireless Internet service fully under the rules for the first time.

The 3-2 vote on party lines by FCC commissioners enshrines a regulation backed by the Obama administration and opposed by cable and telephone companies, which say the rules risk stifling a fast-growing Internet and will lead to rate regulation.

Before June 1, 2014, just four episodes of "Last Week Tonight With John Oliver" had aired. The weekly, half-hour HBO show took on current affairs from comedic angle. Conceptually in debt to Mr. Oliver's alma mater, "The Daily Show," "Last Week Tonight" nonetheless aimed for deeper dives on abstruse subjects, hardly a tried-and-true recipe for TV success. But as the fifth show began at 11 p.m. that Sunday, the British comedian introduced his latest explainer, joking that the internet had vastly increased access to everything from cat pictures to "a case of coyote urine."

What followed was an acclaimed segment on net neutrality, that not only created significant buzz for his show but gave a bump to a political movement that will score its biggest victory to date on Thursday when the Federal Communications Commission is expected to buck cable companies, the GOP, and its own previous stance, to ensure protections for Mr. Oliver's beloved open-access internet for millions of Americans.